Saturday, August 26, 2006

PARIS SHOCKWAVES

Most gay men are familiar with the hagiography surrounding the 1969 Stonewall Riots in Manhattan, and many readers of this magazine are aware of the debt owed by Stonewall and Gay Liberation to the political and cultural upheavals of the late 60s, exemplified by Paris May ’68 and the birth of the New Left. But most homosexuals, particularly in Britain and America, do not know of a group founded in Paris during this turbulent time called GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeenne). This group is the most significant intellectual current to have sprung during the evenements of Paris 1968, and destined to have an effect more world-shattering than Revolutionary Paris 1789. It stood in opposition, not just to the liberal-capitalist establishment, but also to the old Marxist and the then-emerging New Left. In this essay, I will outline some of the unique features of GRECE and its European New Right (ENR, also known as European Identitarian) successors, particularly some of the anti-monotheistic ideology it shares with humanism. I will also explain how homosexuals were gravely mistaken in ignoring the ENR and how instead the blandishments of the Gay-Liberationist-hucksters led us away from our Western civilization, our antecedents; Plato, Hadrian, Michelangelo and Tchaikovsky, turned our folk community into strangers, and deposited us in the heart of the enemy camp.

GRECE shared some of the concerns of the New Left; the danger of mass society, consumerism and environmental degradation, but this superficial agreement hid a yawning chasm between their fundamental positions. While the New Left maintained the fiction of “abstract man” (more on this below), the ENR followed the physical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen in asserting than man is a biocultural being: although culture and biology are two different things, in man they form an indivisible unity. Further, man can never be more than an individuated expression of his native culture. A man may escape his culture physically, through exile, but never in thought or spirit.

Judeo-Christianity

As with men, so with cultures. As in postmodern theory, civilizations are seen as unique and quite literally incomparable, because there is no common frame of reference by which to compare them. But unlike postmodernists, European identitarians believe that real cultures, like real individuals, are rooted in a particular location at a particular time, from which they grow organically. As with any set of cultures growing in a laboratory, random contact is far more likely to lead to contamination than cross-fertilization, and is best avoided. This is the ENR’s first major reason for objecting to Judeo-Christianity. The second major objection is that Judeo-Christianity is the product of a civilization especially hostile to our own.

“We come from the people of the Iliad and the Edda, not the Bible.”, so says Pierre Krebs of the German Thule-Seminar ENR organization. The usurpation of native philosophy and polytheism by alien monotheism has thwarted Europe’s ability to truly be itself – a condition Martin Heidegger has called inauthenticity. Homosexuals should be familiar with the idea of inauthenticity as it describes the condition of the closet. J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn just were two closet-cases famously corrupted because of their inability to truly be themselves. The spiritual inauthenticity of our continent, argue some New Rightists, has resulted in pathological continental quests. First the Crusades into the Near East, western Europe’s first overseas kingdom, then the subjection of America while Europe tore herself apart in the religious wars of the Seventeenth Century, all driven by a Messianic monotheism.

That Europe had been so heavily influenced by alien religions was serious, that they were a product of Semitic civilization was, for Europe, a disaster. This is because of a formative difference between Indo-European and Semitic civilizations. Indo-European cultures originated within a warrior class, or Mannerbund, which imparted Martial values of truth, honour and beauty in the civilizations of Greece, Rome and the nations created by the Celts, Germans and Slavs. Semitic civilization, on the other hand, came from a domestic society of patriarchal nuclear families, governed primarily by material considerations. A clash of civilizations was inevitable when Hellenism, in the person of Alexander the Great, encroached eastward. Sexuality, along with art and philosophy was a front in this cultural war; the Greeks, with a high civilization descended from the Mannerbund, had a relaxed attitude toward homosexuality. For the Jews with their close-knit families and the diktats of their all-powerful god, this was anathema and something they could define themselves against. Into this closed, paranoid atmosphere Christianity was fostered, later introducing its mean homophobia to Rome.

Imperium

Describing itself as meta-political, the ENR has a broad range of themes apart from its anti-Judeo-Christianity. Most important of these is the idea of Imperium, a united Europe, including Russia, which could stretch to the Pacific (territorial extent varies amongst different New Right groups). This Imperium will not be achieved by military conquest but by nations voluntary opting-in. Above all, it’s political and social structure will follow a traditional pattern, based on the researches of Indo-Europeanists like Carl Jung, Georges Dumezil and Stephen Flowers, with the civilization of the Imperium trisected into complimentary functions: first function, leadership; second function, power and technics; third function, production.

This political structure is integral yet flexible. For instance, my own politics derives partly from the volunteerist State described in Robert Heinlein’s STARSHIP TROOPERS, with leaders (first function) elected by citizen volunteers (second function) who have elevated themselves from the producing and consuming mass (third function).

ENR thinkers agree that the Imperium should be polytheistic, autarkic, and that subsidiarity (appropriate local control) must be a major principle. The Imperium may be declared pagan, but free-thinking and the creative imagination will be paramount. Pagans have no “sacred scriptures” or “holy books” that contain the literal word of god, and to which they must sacrifice their powers of reasoning. My own cannon of “sacred books” is drawn from three millennia of Indo-European literature, from Homer and Virgil to the Grail legends, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Hegel, Darwin and Nietzsche (all the writers sneeringly referred to in Anglo-American academia as “Dead White Males”). Philosophical non-duality is an important Indo-European worldview, expressed in Hindu Vedanta, Classical Neo-Platonism and European Nineteenth Century Romanticism, and which undermines all religious absolutism.

Economics is considered by New Rightists at a lower, more materialistic and animalistic (i.e. third function) level than Politics. Distributism is proposed as a solution to global consumer capitalism, although my own preference is for an authoritarian socialist command economy.

Abstract Man

European Identitarians are not hostile to humanists or agnostics. Atheist Vikings were known and respected as “trua a matt sinn ok megin”, which means something along the lines of sufficient unto themselves, or relying on their own power, in Old Norse. Interestingly, the German Musculinist movement (see below) was to use a similar slogan in the Nineteenth Century, derived from the Anarchism of Max Stirner, and novelist Ernst Junger explored the concept in the Twentieth. The humanism of Marsilio Ficino, Botticelli and the Florentine Renaissance originated in Neo-Platonism. It is liberal humanism, the humanism developed by John Locke when his individualistic Protestantism combined with Descarte’s materialism, that the ENR has identified as the universal solvent which dissolves all cultural bonds. Like out-of-control nanobots in a sci-fi nightmare, liberalism threatens to render Earth’s diversity into an atomized, undifferentiated gloop.

John Locke formalized the two main pillars upon which liberalism rests, the Jachin and Boaz which support the temple to capitalist freemasonic individualism, where abstract man stands resplendent. The first principle was the idea of the supremacy of the individual human over everything else in nature. The second was that each individual is, initially at least, a “tabula rasa”, each man is born equally blank and equally interchangeable, like a widget.

Locke’s second principle is scientifically-demonstrable nonsense. Modern genetics and common sense have given short shrift to any lingering belief in a “tabula rasa”. Some European New Right thinkers have gone much further, daring to speculate on the possibility of inherited thought-processes and characteristics (what Michael Moynihan has called ‘meta-genetics’), and even how this could shed new light on traditional European beliefs such as re-incarnation. Meanwhile, in Anglo-American academia, “Queer Studies” professors are paid thousands to drone on about totally scientifically-discredited ideas of “social constructionism” derived from Derrida and Foucault, who in turn got their ideas from the discredited Marxist-Freudean Frankfurt School, themselves a major source of inspiration to the “Gay Liberationists” of the early 70s. Thus another circle is added to Hell, spiralling down the pit of the Kali Yuga, while the queer studies academics continue, like medieval scholars, to count the number of fairies they can fit on the end of a dildo.

As for Locke’s first principle: I would argue if there’s one thing in nature that’s greater than the individual, then it is a collective of individuals working for a common purpose and aspiring to a higher level of existence, what in common speech is called a civilization. If it’s a contest between me and what I know and can do, and Western civilization and what it knows and can do, Western civilization wins hands down. Everything I think and know is mediated by the fact that I belong to this particular civilization at this particular point in time, as Hegel, Heidegger and Gehlen have stated. This of course is the heart of the argument between liberals and the New Right; which has more legitimacy, the individual or the civilization? Liberals cling to the belief in an abstract man – Locke’s widget – who floats naked and free in space, transcending time and civilizations, but who carries with him a folio of Universal Human Rights. From whence this miraculous folio came, no-one asks. New European Rightists would say that it was thrust into his hand (or wherever) by Moses, Jesus, Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke, Hume and Adam Smith. “Abstract man” now at least has a secular trinity to whom he can genuflect: Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, with Princess Diana and Mary Robinson taking turns to hover in the background as the Virgin Mary.

Gay perversity

After the 1967 de-criminalization in the UK, homosexuals faced a choice between re-integrating with European civilization in a way not possible for 1,500 years (i.e. since the Jewish heresy of Christianity infiltrated the Roman Empire), or siding with the Marxist, Maoist, New Left enemies of European civilization, the ones who brought “Gay Liberation” from Manhattan to London. Instead of taking up our traditional responsibility of defending and glorifying our civilization, as did so many homosexuals in the past like Frederick II and von Humboldt, we supported of those who would destroy that very same civilization.

It is poignantly ironic that gay men were tricked by multiculturalists into allowing successive waves of monotheistic, Abrahamic fundamentalism into Europe, such as African evangelist churches and Islam, just as gays were escaping from under the dead weight of the corpse of Christianity.

Marxist cultural indoctrination (ironically called “consciousness-raising”) ensured homosexuals were given a politically correct version of their history, especially in relation to the significant developments in Nineteenth Century Germany. The Masculinist movement (to which most contemporary homosexuals identified, it seems) has been air-brushed out of gay history, while their main opponent, the Jewish psychiatrist Magnus Hirschfeld with his laughably bizarre explanations for homosexuality (as a “third sex”) is honoured in sombre buildings and worthy institutes.

The slipperiness of the multicultural agenda for homosexuals – to identify ourselves as a minority in order to unite with other minorities against a supposedly hostile dominant culture – stands exposed. We were wafted by the undemanding siren-sounds of the jungle to an exotic paradise of limitless consumption, dreaming of an illusory peace and acceptance bedecked in rainbow flags which sparkle with a tinsel diversity. Beyond Sleeping Beauty’s tower, on the plains of Europe, others are building ugly stunted new towers, spires and minarets, each broadcasting a screech of homophobia that would cause even the jealous Johns, Knox and Calvin, to blanch.

Now “gay” is more a playground insult than a serious description of sexuality and the meaningless rainbow flags have since been appropriated by various anti-war groups, some of whom, if they knew the gay associations with the flag, would trample it in the dirt.

2 Comments:

This is an interesting essay. Even though he was not an Indo-European, Mishima seems like a good example of somebody who sought to preserve a culture based on those warrior values you cite (rather than use their homosexuality as a reason to attack that culture). As I understand, Mishima was fairly authentic, as a homosexual, as a Japanese, without contradiction. It is depressingly counterproductive that so many nationalists target homosexuals as one of their "enemies"--an enduring mark of the Christian ethos.

It would be interesting to know more about how the citizen-volunteers "elevate" themselves from the third function, being suspicious in general of democracy.

The New Right weltanschauung is unassailable; it is the adamantine synthesis of the most brilliant minds in European history, from Heraclitus to Martin Heidegger and beyond, and the race-mind which created foundational Aryan mythology. It is the intellectual equivalent of Fortress Europe.
The Spirit of Europe will never be crushed; neither by force of arms, nor by decades of toxic propaganda, nor by a treacherous plutocratic elite groveling to yet another Abrahamic religion.